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Wednesday, 9 January 2013

Hope you all had a good and safe New Year's and I PROMISE that I will get back to good ol' Monarchical Theory sometime this year, but Ireland has been in the news alot recently and its kinda hard for me to outright ignore all the scandals.

The Savita Halappanavar fiasco, the crisis pregnancy center scandal, the Northern Irish Flag controversy and how it made an economic bust of the Christmas period for Belfast city...

Oh, and Ireland is set to have a spin on the President of the Council of the European Union.

Yippee.

(NOT the President of the European Council, they're not the same thing. Brief rundown for our non-Euro readers: Th Council of the European Union is effectively the upper house in the EU Legislature, equivalent to a Senate or House of Lords, the presidency of that position is what Ireland has inherited. The European Parliament is just that, the lower house. The European Council is a rather unique decision making body with no legislative power that nonetheless decides "the general political directions and priorities" of the European Union, a pseudo policy making body, THEN you have the European Commission, the Executive body of the union similar to the cabinet. All four bodies have their own presidents. If this sounds like an unnecessary amount of steps divorced from the national decision making authority then you are correct and it is intentional, the Union ceased to be a mere trading bloc a long time ago.)

In the midst of this crisis or that crisis, my own doom-mongering over the absolutely terrifying debt we owe both as Ireland the nation and collectively as a continent, I seem to have been proven consistently wrong (me and my more extremist eurosceptic compatriots). Which is laughable because kicking a lit dynamite down the road doesn't prove the alarmist wrong about the fact that it is, in fact, a lit dynamite and time is running out.

The Americans found that out rather starkly this New Year's with the threat of the fiscal cliff which they have now completely, and unequivocally solved... by kicking it down the road.

What does all this have to do with this post's title? Well it has to do with the reality of the situation. I talked with a few friends, one in particular who studied economics in secondary and has moved on to studying politics in tertiary, the European single currency and by extension the European Union as a whole cannot exist in its current state indefinitely and must either decentralize and risk turning into a loose confederation and the destruction of the single currency or centralize so completely as to effectively destroy the traditional nations of Europe as extant entities.

But of course reading this blog you know my opinions on these matters. But herein lies the looming cloak and dagger.

We know the European Union as an entity and its supporters would never, except perhaps with the threat of nuclear annihilation, ever give in and allow the Union to be dissolved so we are almost certainly be going down the centralization route as we have been for the past while.

But if we slip into realpolitik for a second, a question emerges: So what? This is a question painful to a patriot's ears when faced with this prospect. But in realpolitik this would stabilize currency and the security of the European state and probably lead to economic recovery if not prosperity and, as far as realpolitik is concerned, a good thing has happened.

Too bad it disregards the necessary totalitarianism involved.

Europe is too vast and too diverse to ever be a true unitary state, the only reason other huge federal states such as the USA and Mexico and Brazil can exist as they are is because most of those states share a common lineage and history in their foundation I'd hate to say it but those states where 'constructed' before they began to grow whereas most European identities and cultures were free range and grew naturally if violently, their colonial past makes their integration and acceptance of federal unionism slightly easier (even if the Americans would never admit it). If we look to other huge unitary states towards the east, namely Russia and China, we see the frightening totalitarianism of China to keep it all together and the rather authoritarian federalism of Russia (obviously Russia is the much more preferable country but hear me out) Both these unions have such a huge variety of cultures, languages, traditions and religions within them, even their dominant ethnicities have sub ethnicities and differences (evident with the Slavs in Russia and its constituent Republics), it is impossible to keep such diversity into nice, roughly even political voting groups with which to run a stable representative democracy, the system is simply too damn big (there's a monarchism article in that actually, I'll get to it some other time) and it'd be even worse with direct participatory democracy with having the votes of the sparser populated republics simply ignored outright by bigger neighbors, (and country folk and townsfolk ignored outright by city voters). In a centralized European Union, dissent would have to be quashed. Harshly.

We are seeing signs already with Cameron being FORCED by rebels within his party to push for more autonomy from the EU while still having a relationship and Europhilic hardliners playing hardball with the new fiscal deal, how in the hell would Countries such as Hungary which INFAMOUSLY threw off alot of European regulations and reformed its constitution in a most 'unEuropean' fashion fair in a United States of Europe? Pretty damn unfairly and I wouldn't be surprised if Europe 'economically sanctioned' Hungary into starvation to get it to capitulate to European oneness. "Silly Magyars, you aren't a country, you're a province." I am not sure it would get to the point of sanctioning outspoken eurosceptics but I would not be surprised if Nationalists the continent over would be labelled as 'Fascists' or some other politically loaded phrase and ostracized from society somehow for being 'reactionary' and 'anti-unionist'. Europhiles today even predict this and look forward to 'justifiably' calling their euroscpetic counterparts 'throwbacks', fully complicit in the creation of a 'politically unacceptable' underclass. I have no idea where it would go fromt here but I doubt it would lead to some kind of second renaisence or some other explosion of culture and beauty. Because if growing up in a postmodern world has thought me anything is that the modern world is an ugly thing that revels in its own horror, and its kind of hard to have an explosion of culture when you have spent decades destroying any semblance of such a thing by importing immigrants to plug holes in your demographics caused by very ill advised population, abortion and contraception laws, creating multiculturalism to try to stem the backlash at cultural invasion and THEN using said multiculturalism as a social engineering tool that has resulting in absolute disaster and nigh universal condemnation. All to try to create some kind of blank slate with which to build the 'great and noble European' culture which never existed in the first place. The European state will label its opponents as fascist and use fascism to silence them.

And we aren't alone in this. With regards to American politics, with apologies to my American readers, but I say a pox on both their houses for their parties and a further pox on both their houses for those parties' supporters. The American election cycle was bothersome and dominated everything and I saw a good deal of what I hated about America ruining what I love about America. I suppose I should leave it at that before I say something I can't take back. But my point is that some of the extremists in America, of both the right and left, are absolutely correct. America has become a corporate run nightmare state and is 4 out of 5 laws passed before becoming a UN recognized police state, the most recent law of which, asides from the infamous 'Drone assassin' law that allows the US Government to kill US citizens via assassination, it has also recently passed a law that allows for the indefinite military incarceration and detention of US citizens suspected of terrorism without trial. A law suspending Habeas Corpus effectively. The only law America is missing before reaching the magic 5 laws before being seen as UN recognized police state (based on Nazi Germany no less) is a law allowing for the term limit of the presidency or equivalent executive office to become indefinite.

But that is incredibly unlikely right? It'd never happen, why just last century America passed a Constitutional amendment PREVENTING a president from having no limit to the amount of terms he may serve, if a president were popular enough, effectively be tantamount to indefinite term limit, there would never be a law attempting to overrule such an amendment and it would be so unlikely to pass over thirty of the state legislatures it'd need to, why, no one would have the sheer brass ones needed to put it before congress.